Is there any secret to finding the Bobbleheads beyond wandering around or using a FAQ/strategy guide? I've found 4 in my travels and like the boost they give you.

Not that I know of. I think I found about one third to a half on my own, the rest I used an online guide for. Even if you check out every major location in the game, some are in dark corners or hard to spot locations. I don't think there are any in game guides to their locations.

Ah, the classic zombie defence. In all seriousness though, zero sympathy for the supposed victim. I like how he follows Woody for four minutes alleging he’s being assaulted. I know I’d snap if I always had cameras in my face, especially when the photographers act like such idiots.

It's begun. The Boxmasters (a band full of musicians and no actors) have cancelled the rest of their Canadian tour. This is reportedly due to members being ill with the flu and not any booing which may or may not have occurred when the drummer was on stage in Toronto.

Billy Bob (the musician) played Massey Hall in Toronto on Thursday and was booed by the crowd when he tried to clarify his mashed potatoes without the gravy comment.

They band has now cancelled the remainder of their Canadian tour due to one member and several crew being sick with the flu. They beleive they should be over the flu for the remainder of their non Canadian tour dates.

On the positive side, it seems to have some pretty good production values and was well shot, but the negatives were overwhelming for me.

First, many of the characters seemed like over the top caricatures, with some of the worst dialogue in recent memory. Some genuinely hilarious bits (Cudlitz telling McKenzie he looks like he's off 90210) were obliterated by the outlandish and preachy speeches talking about how gritty their job is (Cudlitz whole monologue after the shooting for example). To make things worse, they’ve include profanity in the script only to be bleeped out. It this supposed to be edgy? Because it’s making me feel like I’m watching an episode of Arrested Development.

My second major complaint would be about how much they tried to fit into this one episode. We have the kidnapping and murder of a young girl, which felt like just a minor side story. I guess they’re trying to introduce all of the characters right off the bat, but the show needs more focus. Too many characters with too many plots creates confusion and a story I could care less about.

I know pilots can be unpredictable, so I'll give the show a few more episodes to get its footing. But if it doesn’t do a major turn around soon, I’ll be giving it a pass.

I'm going to record it as well. I'd love to see a good police show that focuses on frontline patrol officers versus Detectives for a change. Last show I recall that tried that was the very short lived High Incident. However judging by the previews, it looks like's it's going to be overly dramatic drek.

It seems that many performers are not happy with the current state of concerts in Canada. As some of you may have read in another thread, Billy Bob Thornton (the musician) described Canadian audiences as being like “mashed potatoes with no gravy”, and lamented that we tend to just sit on our asses whereas elsewhere crowds throw things at one another.

Well, easy enough to dismiss the concerns of one critic, but last night Pop Diva Britney Spears had to halt a Canadian show due the actions of the crowd.

“Britney Spears, offended by the wafting fumes of what she suspected was marijuana, halted her concert in Vancouver Wednesday night for about 45 minutes until the smell apparently dissipated.

Spears, according to the Vancouver Sun, left the stage dark and empty from about 8:30 p.m. until 9:05 p.m.; at about 8:45 p.m., a PA announcer told the crowd: "It’s become uncomfortable and unsafe for the performers, including Ms. Spears. The show will resume as soon as the air around the stage is clear. The performance will not proceed until the air clears.”

While the presence of marijuana may explain the sedated state of Canadian crowds, I would like to apologize to Ms. Spears for the incident. Clearly her body is a temple, and she is a virgin to the taint of illicit drugs. I can only ask that she and other performers not judge all Canadians by this one act, and pray that a Parliamentary enquiry be called into how marijuana made it out to our Conservative West Coast. Please don't let this stop the influx of talented performers to our fair shores!

Be strong Canadians. Live by the words of wisdom that Britney left with the crowd in Vancouver: “Drive safe, don't smoke weed and rock out with your cock out. Peace out mother fuckers!"

Its a well known fact that Billy Bob doesn't like it when people refer to his acting while he is in band mode. The interviewer was told by his Producers not to bring it up and he did it anyway. That's just going to ruin the mood for the whole interview. It was a stupid thing to do by the interviewer. There is no reason to "set the context" because everyone is going to know who Billy Bob Thornton is without him having to refer to Oscar winning actor/director/writer whatever.

I think it’s perfectly fair to bring up your guests past accomplishments and career highlights, in fact it would be somewhat strange not to. Thorton telling the host he was "instructed" not to bring up a topic is ridiculous in an interview format. If Thorton really was so upset by this, he could have simply redirected the host by stating he’d rather just talk about his music during the interview (which the host was doing anyway). Instead he acts very childish, creates a very negative impression, and then completely avoids answering questions on the very subject he wants to talk about. He then goes on to complain that all the questions he was asked about music aren't the kind of questions that would be asked to other musicians. Bottom line is that he acted like a major prick for what was a very minor perceived slight.

From the Canadian Press coverage:

Quote

When his band closed the "Q" appearance with a song, Thornton refused to sing and they played without vocals.

Ghomeshi said later in a telephone interview that Thornton left without saying goodbye or thanking the host.

"His band members, however, were very cordial, and thanked me and, I dare say, I'm speculating, seemed almost apologetic, though they didn't say sorry," Ghomeshi said.

Now I realise that just the host’s impression, but it makes me feel sorry for the rest of the band. They probably don’t have other careers outside of music (which I can’t mention) for financial support.

You are correct that the call would not be instant, but if you trigger the panic mode on either the keypad panel or the remote key fob it is instant. I was told that the police react quickest to panic mode trips whereas they delay a bit for confirmation from ADT for burglar trips.Panic modes are hard to accidentally initiate.

Panic or holdup alarms do get a faster response than general alarms, but calling 911 is still the fastest route. No delay while the alarm company forwards the information to police, and responding officers will know exactly what to expect.

As for panic alarms being hard to initiate, it seems like quite a few people in the town where I work can prove you wrong.

Quote from: DamageInc on April 08, 2009, 04:59:56 PM

The number one thing criminals do not want is attention being brought to them so the alarm alone is a very solid deterrant

Agreed, to a point. As TK-421 pointed out, signs warning of an alarm are probably as much of a deterrent as the alarm itself. You probably don’t need to go all out on a state of the art alarm system unless you’re a bank or the like. In my experience most break and enters are committed by drugs users in desperate need of another high. They often aren’t the “professional” thieves that we typically imagine. They’ll simply walk up and kick in a door or smash out a window, and grab a handful of electronics before booking it. Sometimes they’re so cracked out that they don’t even care if neighbours are watching, so for them the fact that a home is alarmed doesn’t even register.

Don’t get me wrong, alarms do serve a purpose, but they’re not some magical safety net that the companies try to make them out to be.

From what I remember, the book was mostly just illustrations, with just a line or two of text on most pages. They'll certainly have to be creative to fill a two hour run time. That being said, I've got a feeling Spike Jonze is certainly capable of doing so and making a cool film to boot. The Wild Things look pretty good, and Max's wolf costume is dead on.

Oh, and I like the version of Wake Up by Arcade Fire used in the trailer. According to Pitchfork it was recorded just for the trailer.

Alarm response may vary from one town to another, but I don't think they're really worth the money. Locally, 99% of the alarms we respond to are false. Either someone didn't properly close a door, forgot their code, or a breeze triggers a motion sensor. Because of this, unless there are some extenuating circumstances, all residential alarms get ranked as low priority calls. Average response times vary from 20 minutes to several hours depending on the time of day and volume of calls. The thieves and your property will be long gone prior to police arrival. Even if an alarm gets ranked as high priority, it takes several minutes before police are even dispatched. First the alarm needs to get triggered, and be active for one or two minutes. After the correct amount of time passes, the alarm company is alerted, and tries to contact your residence. If they can’t get through after a minute, only then do they contact our dispatcher who generates a call and sends some officers. You’re still looking at a ten minute response time on a good day.

I think it’s ADT that keeps running the ads where the girl is home alone and the stereotypical thief dressed all in black breaks in just after her parents leave. ADT phones her up, calms her down and dispatches the police. The ad makes me laugh because first of all the ADT call wouldn't be instant, and either way you’d be a lot better off calling 911 yourself and telling the police directly what happened.

I know alarm systems can act as a deterrent and give home owners peace of mind, but I personally think they’re way too overpriced for what you get. Don't let fear override common sense resulting in you paying through the nose for a system that's overkill. Also don’t forget to factor in the cost of registering your alarm (many police services charge an annual fee to even recognize your alarm) and local fines for false alarms (quite common if you have children or pets). I’m pretty sure my service charges the homeowner $100 per false alarm, with the cost going up by $100 for each additional false alarm.

OnLive says it would be difficult for its users to exceed the monthly bandwidth caps that Internet service providers are increasingly placing on their subscribers. A typical user would have to play about 284 hours — nearly 12 full days — to consume Comcast Corp.'s 250-gigabyte cap. Nielsen Co. estimates many gamers play roughly 60 hours a month.

Here in Canada, I pay one of the more expensive ISP rates and I only get 60gb cap. Considering I pretty much use up that 60gb every month anyway, I dunno how this would work.

Same here. I come close to maxing out my 60GB cap each month, I don't think I'd have the bandwidth to spare for gaming on top of everything else. Cool idea, but too bad ISPs everywhere are starting to limit and throttle traffic.

I’ve been working shifts for six years now, and I feel your pain trying to adjust sleeping schedules. There is no easy sure fire way, and sometimes your body just won’t co-operate. As for switching back to a regular day schedule, I’ll echo what previous posters have said. You’ve really got to tough it out and force yourself to stay awake on the transition day.

I work a 35 day rotation, where I work seven midnight shifts in a row. The first day off after midnights I’ll keep active and stay awake until about nine or ten at night. It’s tough, you’ll either need something interesting to do or caffeine, cause if you just try to sit on the couch watching TV you’ll probably fall asleep. You’ll be a zombie all day (don’t try driving, you’re basically impaired), but it resets your sleep schedule back to normal, and you’ll sleep like a baby on the first night.

You’ll probably feel some low periods for the next few days as well where you feel tired, but don’t give in to midday naps. You’ll probably sleep longer then you want to, and you’ll have a harder time falling asleep at night.

Ok, I'm actually pretty impressed. Do you need to replace Firefox? No, but it fixes a lot of problems with IE7.

Things I like so far...

- Address bar domain highlighting. Unlike DragonFyre I think this is a good idea. Should we know better? Probably. But it's still a good reminder, especially for people with minimal web knowledge.- Deleting your browsing history now has an option to exlcude your favourite sites. Cleans out the junk, but saves all your password and settings. Nice.- Tab Color Grouping. Tabs from the same site get assigned the same color, and get sorted together.- InPrivate browsing (i.e. Pr0n Mode). Not that I look at that stuff.

Seems a little quicker overall, and much less prone to crashing when a page stalls out or has errors. You can't go wrong with the upgrade I'd say, but you don't have to dump Firefox either. I know there is a lot of IE hate (with good reason), but version 8 seems like a pretty solid browser. I'm not going to write it off just yet cause it's from MS.

And Leo not sure what problem you're having with Gmail, but I've certainly never had problems using it with IE.

I am more concerned about team AI than graphics. Whatever game accomplishes decent AI will win my cash .

but pretties! and shineys! and 'splosions!

The AI is important, but with this type of game graphics play an equally important role. ARMA had a very impressive 10KM draw distance and if you had the right weapons, you could have some insanely long range firefights. When you bring air vehicles into the mix like the A-10, if you can't see the enemy from a reasonable distance out you're playing with a handicap. While you certainly didn’t need to run ARMA on its absolute maximum settings, when the draw distance was turned down too much it made the game unplayable.

Maybe but Codemaster at least have alot of experience with 360 so maybe OFP2 is a better option for consoles?

Possibly. Keep in mind though this is the first time Codemasters is making an Operation Flashpoint game. The original OpFlash was created by Bohemia Interactive, who went on to make ARMA and now ARMA II. Codemasters simply published the original Operation Flashpoint. They held onto the rights to the name, hence why Bohemia Interactive had to change the name for the sequel. Codemasters certainly makes some great games, but I`d say Bohemia Interactive has a bit more experience with this particular genre. Either way I consider it a win win situation when two companies create a game in a genre I like.

Quote from: CeeKay on March 12, 2009, 12:29:59 AM

I'm wondering how the console versions will handle the open world aspect without alot of pop in and stutters from loading.

I`m guessing the game will push most PCs to their limits on launch as well, but will have settings that can take advantage of future hardware.

I reserve judgment until I see the actual finished product. Remember the Phantom Menace trailer? It had me hyped with its classical Star Wars music and action/special effect shots. Then I saw the actual film.

I'm sure Lucas can make a great trailer for the show with pretty special effects, but will there be a decent weekly story?

Regardless, I'm sure the first few episodes will get crazy viewership numbers.

Just had a look at this video and it looks great. I hope both games plays well on a 360 because that is the format I will play them on.

I'd read some reviews first. The original port of Operation Flashpoint to the Xbox was a mess. It came out about 4 years after the PC release, but with inferior graphics and a useless control scheme.

The next gen version will hopefully at least be able to keep pace in terms of graphics to the PC, but these games always have such demanding controls that I'm not sure how they'll make it work with a gamepad.

I'm watching this one with interest, mainly because of the promise of 5000 square miles of open terrain. I'm a big fan of open world games, just being able to drive around and explore. Of course with such a huge environment, I'm wondering how much detail there will be. I'm guessing this might be something more akin to MS Flight Simulator, where you have large paches of generic scenery, with the occasional detailed city. I'm curious to find out if moments like the house in the tornado are just random encounters or triggered events on certain races.

Still, it will be nice if they can pull of a racing game with good A.I. where you're not stuck to a track. I'd love a huge cross country race across the whole map, something that could take a few hours to complete. Fingers crossed on this one.

New trailer is also up on Quicktime if you want it in HD. Actually, watching the Youtube and Quicktime version back to back, I've noticed they're slightly different. Quicktime trailer shows a longer run time, and seems to have some extended shots, but drops the scene with Uhura telling Kirk she hopes he knows what he's doing.

The driver was inexperienced and misunderstood a stop signal. This shouldn't have been a big deal since signals have trip arms that stop the train automatically, but the design was faulty and the train crashed into another one underground. So while I hope the Toronto subway system is now fixed, I think it shows its possible for automatic systems to fail, even without terrorist help.

Continuing my trend of buying any game with the words "Total War" on the package on release day, I will be picking up Empires. I'm going with the retail as it registers on Steam anyway, and I want the manual in hard copy for this one.

So if we buy the retail copy, can you download it through Steam in future when you want to reinstall? I was just going to go with the Steam version, but I'd like a hard copy of the manual as well.